Trump, fate, and his convention speech

The New Neo Posted on by

This is why I put up that clip from The Day of the Jackal yesterday:

Former President Donald Trump can’t stop thinking about the way he moved his head in the split second before a gunman, intent on assassinating him, pulled the trigger during his speech in Pennsylvania Saturday evening. Trump was standing at the podium and began to refer to a large screen, hanging to his right, that showed statistics about immigration. To better see the screen, Trump turned his head to the right and a little up, and at the millisecond in which his head was at just the right angle for the bullet to graze his ear but not enter his skull — at that moment, the bullet whizzed by. Trump suffered a bloody wound to his ear, but no other injuries. It seemed like a miracle.

“The most incredible thing was that I happened to not only turn but to turn at the exact right time and in just the right amount,” Trump said Sunday afternoon in a talk aboard his 757 as he flew to Milwaukee for the start of the Republican National Convention. “If I only half-turn, it hits the back of the brain. The other way goes right through [the skull]. And because the sign was high, I’m looking up. The chances of my making a perfect turn are probably one tenth of one percent, so I’m not supposed to be here.”

“I had to be at the exact right angle,” Trump said at another point in the conversation, which included the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin. “Because the thing was an eighth of an inch away. That I would turn exactly at that second, where he [the gunman] wouldn’t stop the shot is pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. I’m really not supposed to be here.”

You can’t have such a thing happen to you and not be at least somewhat changed by it. Does Trump think it was merely good luck, or divine intervention, or fate?

The relevant part of the Jackal clip is here:

In the movie, the would-be assassin gains access to a cleared building by masquerading as an elderly war veteran on crutches, but the audience knows that he has a high-powered weapon disguised as one of the crutches. The moment in which DeGaulle moves his head out of the way of the shot is preceded by a scene much earlier in the movie when the Jackal tests out the same weapon by firing it at a watermelon, which explodes and is a stand-in for DeGaulle’s head. At the time the movie was first released, the frame of the Zapruder film that showed something similar happening to JFK had not yet been shown to the public, but anyone who was familiar with the Warren Commission report knew that something similar must have happened to JFK. So the horror was quite fresh.

Here’s the movie scene with the watermelon. Although it only involves a watermelon, it’s incredibly horrifying:

Trump says he’s changed his speech as a result of his experience on Saturday:

Trump explained that before Saturday night, he had finished the speech he planned to give later this week at the Republican convention. “I basically had a speech that was an unbelievable rip-roarer,” he said. “It was brutal — really good, really tough. [Last night] I threw it out. I think it would be very bad if I got up and started going wild about how horrible everybody is and how corrupt and crooked, even if it’s true. Had this not happened, we had a speech that was pretty well set that was extremely tough. Now, we have a speech that is more unifying.”

Good luck with that.

The Republican convention has started in Milwaukee. Trump plans to announce his VP today, rumored to be J. D. Vance.

The Trump assassination attempt: a few answers but mostly questions

The New Neo Posted on by

Details are slowly emerging. One of the better sources is the NY Post.

The shooter was 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, reported to have been a “bullied loner” in high school Of course, that was also the initial report on the Columbine shooters and it turns out to have been wrong in their case. My guess is that few people were friendly with Crooks and therefore few knew him. I’ve also read that the gun was purchased by his father, and that Crooks was registered as a Republican but contributed to a far left cause at around the time of Biden’s inauguration.

The shooter’s car is reported to have contained explosives, which I would assume were meant to injure or kill the law enforcement officials who found it.

Various witnesses saw the shooter on the roof – which was about 130 yards from where Trump was speaking – and reported a man crawling there with a rifle, but authorities were slow to respond. Here’s one interview:

One of my first thoughts on hearing of the shooting was “how did someone get a firearm into the rally?” I quickly learned that was not the case, and that the shooter was outside the venue on a nearby rooftop. This prompted my next thought, “Why weren’t all the rooftops cleared?” I’ve read enough about security to know that’s standard, especially because this wasn’t a city with many rooftops, but an outdoor area with just a few. Many people are asking the same question, because this seems like a clear screwup. And of course, conspiracy theories abound.

One spectator was killed; 50-year-old ex-volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore:

[His daughter] Allyson said that when the gunshots rang out, Comperatore quickly threw her and her mother to the ground to try to protect them after Trump was shot.

“He truly loved us enough to take a real bullet for us,” Allyson wrote on Facebook.

“And I want nothing more than to cry on him and tell him thank you.”

Terrible. RIP. Two others were badly wounded; I haven’t seen anything about their identities except that they were adult men.

Biden and other Democrats have mouthed words deploring the violence. And yet there is no question in my mind that their rhetoric set the scene for this type of attempt, whether it actually motivated Crooks himself or not. I have heard Democrats casually talk about wanting Trump assassinated; the idea has been normed (see this).

Many people have remarked on Trump’s heroic defiance just a moment after coming within a inch of death, and there are the photos and videos to prove it. I’ll just say it doesn’t surprise me; he’s a tough guy. He’d better be.

The world’s tallest ballet dancer

The New Neo Posted on by

Here he is, Fabrice Calmels, at over 6 feet 6 inches tall:

Here’s a short article about him.

He’s a fairly good dancer, too, although his feet are a bit scrunched in the toes rather than in the arch. A video:

How does he do it? You may or may not be aware that it’s much harder to be a tall ballet dancer than a short one, and that in the case of male dancers, “tall” means anything over 5’10”. The tallest ballet dancer I’d ever heard about prior to this guy was Peter Martins, at 6’2″, and he was already unusually tall for a ballet dancer.

NOTE: Here’s a previous article I wrote about height and ballet dancers.

Melanie Phillips on the war against the Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

Phillips’ assessment is sobering, but I’m in total agreement with her and have thought the following myself since October 7:

We have to face without flinching what is now undeniable: There is a war across the globe raging against the Jewish people. It’s a war not just to destroy their national homeland but to drive them out of people’s heads, their conscience and their world.

Led by Muslims and the left, with its base in the universities, this war has extended much further than these circles into professional and commercial life.

Phillips goes on to explain that it’s a combination of Iranian and Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, allied with the left, that’s driving the spread of this toxic hatred.

While many Muslims don’t subscribe to fanaticism or fundamentalism, far too many do—and the overwhelming majority subscribe to the demonization and delegitimization of Israel that flow from Muslim Jew-hatred.

The reason the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel sparked immediate and triumphant Muslim demonstrations was the ecstatic belief that, having destroyed Israeli invincibility by murdering and capturing so many Jews, the way was now open to destroy Israel, wipe out the Jews and conquer the West for Islam.

The far-left, who have latched on to the anti-West aims of this campaign, also believe that their revolutionary time has come.

For those who have been puzzled as to why Jew-hatred has risen in the wake of the barbaric October 7 attack, that’s the reason: evil triumphant.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) An Israeli airstrike is reported to have killed Deif and company:

Muhammad Deif, the elusive commander of Hamas’s military wing, and another top commander in the terror group were targeted in an airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday morning, the Israeli military said.

Deif and Rafa’a Salameh were struck with large munitions above ground while in a low building between the al-Mawasi area and Khan Younis in southern Gaza, and not in a tunnel.

Hamas claimed that over 90 people had been killed in the strike.

According to the IDF’s assessments, no hostages were held at the site when the strike was carried out.

(2) Involuntary manslaughter charges against Alec Baldwin have been dismissed due to egregious prosecutorial misconduct.

(3) The UNRWA expose continues:

During raids over the last week on a Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad combat complex embedded in a former UNRWA compound, troops of the Commando Brigade’s combat team, operating under the direction of the 99th Division, located significant terror infrastructure embedded in the facility.

Among the weapons and infrastructure located in the UNRWA complex were war rooms used for surveillance operations, parts for UAV assembly, tactical drones, rockets, machine guns, mortars, explosives, and grenades, the IDF added.

(4) The pro-Biden wing of the Democrat Party doesn’t tolerate any backtalk:

Classy.

(5) Catfight:

When Kamala Harris took to the stage during a Democratic primary debate before the 2020 election and implied that Joe Biden was racist, his wife, Jill’s, response was crystal clear.

‘Go f**k yourself,’ the then-future first lady vented, as she allegedly admitted during a conference call with supporters.

And the relationship between the two women – that began badly enough during that contentious battle for the presidential nomination – has only gone downhill from there.

Now, political insiders have told DailyMail.com that Democratic advisors are struggling to push past the powerful role that Jill Biden’s loathing of Harris, 59, is playing in Joe’s resistance to pass the mantle to his VP as pressure ratchets up for him to step down as presidential candidate and allow another Democrat tackle Donald Trump.

According to one former Democrat operative in Jill’s circle, the women’s long-seated animosity is ‘one hundred per cent’ part of Jill’s resistance to having her 81-year-old husband step aside.

It’s probably a factor, but I am of the firm belief that neither Jill nor Joe would be willing to step aside even without the Kamala problem. Their selfish and narcissistic ambition is enormous.

Apparatchik Lawrence O’Donnell on Biden’s “big boy” press conference

The New Neo Posted on by

O’Donnell is shameless. I mean that literally [emphasis mine]:

The big question for Joe Biden is how does he handle speaking off the teleprompter? That’s been the big question since the debate…so what followed was nothing less than the most masterful televised presidential press conference about foreign policy. There have been other presidential press conferences that have exhibited mastery at different points by some presidents but on foreign policy, complex foreign policy involving the Middle East and the situation in Ukraine, this is as good as it gets with an American president.

O’Donnell is is 72 years old and has been a leftist commentator for quite a bit of his adult life. He also was a writer for The West Wing, and is a self-declared socialist – actually a “European” socialist, although he’s a Boston-born American who went to Harvard. What is “European” about him is anybody’s guess; probably his self-important pretentiousness:

In a 2005 interview, O’Donnell called himself a “practical European socialist”. O’Donnell also declared himself a “socialist” on the November 6, 2010, Morning Joe show, stating: “I am not a progressive. I am not a liberal who is so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to ‘progressive’. Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals.” On the August 1, 2011, episode of The Last Word, O’Donnell further explained: “I have been calling myself a socialist ever since I first read the definition of socialism in the first economics class I took in college”

So he hasn’t changed much since college – no surprise there.

So, whom is O’Donnell addressing when he shamelessly calls Biden’s speech and performance so very masterful? I don’t think for a moment he believes what he says, but I think he is counting on the fact that most people haven’t seen Biden’s press conference and will take O’Donnell’s word for how very wonderful it was. It’s been my experience that most people rely on pundits to interpret reality for them, and O’Donnell knows that much of the MSNBC audience will take his word for it. He is confident in his own ability to not just interpret reality for that audience but to create reality.

Getting rid of Joe: let’s look at the 25th Amendment

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats face a quandary of their own making. They nominated a man in 2020 who was clearly on the wane, mentally and physically. They did it not because he’d be good at the presidency but because they thought he could win or could be made to win. And win he did, whether by hook or by crook.

They also thought – or some of them thought – that his continuing decline could be covered up for enough time to figure out an alternative for 2024. The debate on June 27 changed that calculus, but the perception of Joe’s fitness had already been faltering. No number of better – not good, but better – “press conferences” or teleprompter speeches will undo what was seen at the debate.

It seems pretty clear that the majority of Democrats would like to remove Biden from contention, but he has stubbornly and egotistically refused to go voluntarily. That was part of the Democrats’ 2020 bargain, too: “stubborn” and “egotistical” are Joe’s two middle names.

And it’s not as though Joe is utterly senile. I’ve been saying for a long long time that although Joe is significantly cognitively compromised, he still has some agency and some say in things. As commenter Niketas Choniates writes:

To me it seems clear that Biden is VERY old and has good and bad days. However, he is not a vegetable, he knows he’s supposed to be President and is officially at the head of the Executive. He also knows it’s the capstone of a long career in office.

He will not resign and he will not be removed by Amendment 25, because he’s competent enough to successfully challenge using the Amendment 25 process (which folks should get really get around to reading for themselves, because media is not truthfully representing it).

I think the only way he leaves the Presidency is feet first–he won’t be voted out because Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are fortified for democracy. A successful Amendment 25 removal would only happen if he really were a vegetable, or so senile that he actually doesn’t remember he’s President even on good days.

(If they tried to remove him in the “vegetable” scenario, I’m assuming that his staff and or his wife would produce a letter under his name challenging his inability, and Congress would insist on seeing and interacting with Joe Biden in person before voting whether to restore his powers, which would mean something like a month of no one knowing who has the powers of the Presidency.)

So let’s look at the relevant portion of the 25th Amendment:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department [sic][note 2][7] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

That’s a mouthful. The article goes on to add that the drafters of the amendment deliberately left the definition of “inability” vague:

… [There is] no specific threshold – medical or otherwise – for the “inability” contemplated in Section 4. The framers specifically rejected any definition of the term, prioritizing flexibility. Those implementing Section 4 should focus on whether – in an objective sense taking all of the circumstances into account – the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the office. The amendment does not require that any particular type or amount of evidence be submitted to determine that the President is unable to perform his duties. While the framers did imagine that medical evidence would be helpful to the determination of whether the President is unable, neither medical expertise nor diagnosis is required for a determination of inability … To be sure, foremost in [the minds of the framers] was a physical or mental impairment. But the text of Section 4 sets forth a flexible standard intentionally designed to apply to a wide variety of unforeseen emergencies …

It seems to me that, if enough Democrats were to come along, the 25th could be invoked to remove Joe despite his protests and/or challenges. But it would be a very bitter and divisive experience for the Democrats.

The Democrats in the Senate defeat the SAVE Act

The New Neo Posted on by

Voting for everyone! It’s “xenophobic” to worry about limiting votes to citizens:

Senate Democrats blocked the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act Thursday, a bill mandating proof of citizenship for federal voters, which passed the House late Wednesday.

Here’s the “xenophobic” charge:

Rep. Summer Lee: “Let me be clear: They don’t want you to vote. They don’t want to hear Black voices, Brown voices, LGBTQIA voices, young voices. Our fundamental access to our democracy is being politicized. And this xenophobic attack that we’re debating today will make it harder for Americans to vote. My Republican colleagues will claim that requiring IDs is a small ask, but nearly 30 million people lack a valid driver’s license, and about 15 to 18 million adults don’t have access to documents proving their birth or citizenship. Americans don’t need more obstacles. It’s already hard enough.”

Oh, so hard to vote! So hard to prove something a person has to prove in order to do things that are a lot more common than voting. But this is the rhetoric, and it works with a lot of people.

Meanwhile, faith in the integrity of our elections is gone, and that’s a dangerous thing.

Remember HR1. If the Democrats get into power again, they will pass a federal law banning things like proof of citizenship for voting, even in red states. The idea is permanent power for the left.